As a continuation of the historical theme, Axel Steensberg paid a visit to 
Australia in late 1983 [I presume at Golson's invitation]  AS looked like he 
was 90+ in the shade.  There he had the joy of visiting the First Government 
House site excavation in Sydney, which was the first real attempt at open 
area excavation in Australian historical archaeology and he got to flirt 
with the director.

If Geoff is colour coding a map of the world to show who uses colour pencils 
then certainly Australia should be coded 'blank - never used'.

Denis
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "paul.courtney2" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Monday, October 17, 2005 5:36 AM
Subject: Re: Harris Matrix


> As far as UK is concerned systematic open area excavation was introduced 
> at Wharram Percy by John Hurst and his colleagues I guess at the end of 
> the 1950s. Jack  Golson (subseuently ANU in Australia) was sent off to 
> Denmark to learn the method from Axel Steensberg who was digging rural 
> medieval sites. When I started digging as a schoolboy in the late 1960s it 
> was perhaps not universal but pretty standard on sites of all periods when 
> one had any resources. The 1970s saw the Chris Musson, Bill Britnell  and 
> Graeme Guilbert strip big areas of Iron Age hillforts and Francis Pryor 
> huge prehistoric sites on the fen edge gravels. A lot of people 
> experimented with new methods like using levelled plans to reconstrct 
> sections at will and digging features the way they were infilled minmising 
> dug sections. The big shift was winter digging in towns and the creation 
> of full-time excavation units. This created its own problems such as the 
> increasing expense of urban excavtions eg from shoring alone and the build 
> up of publication backlogs. A far as colouring goes I think hardly anyone 
> has time certainly not in the commercial world.
>
>
>
>
>
>
> geoff carver wrote:
>
>>that's one of those things i find hard to document; other sources 
>>(barker?) say open area came from some of van gennep's work in the 
>>netherlands... maybe the dutch started it, but no one read dutch reports, 
>>the danish caught on/reinvented the wheel, & it spread from there...?
>>martin carver & a few other critix don't like it cuz it is so systematic - 
>>strictly ordinal -
>>i'm also looking at a case where the matrix & context sheets were 
>>introduced (by london exiles in the early 1990s) then discarded for 
>>something i find mind-bogglingly complex...
>>
>>"paul.courtney2" <[log in to unmask]> schrieb:
>>
>>
>>>style of excavation but there was a move away from sections as open area
>>>excavation (adopted from Danish rural excavations) became the norm.
>>
>>
>
>